With Close Encounters complete and marketing for it underway, my development focus has shifted to an expansion pack for it. For the moment, I’m prioritising what I think of as “Strapped and Packed” – an expansion which includes heavy weapons for the troopers, equipment cards for them to use, and some bigger and nastier bugs to oppose them!
There are two main reasons I’m focusing on this pack first. For one thing, it’s conceptually simpler for both me and players. Everything in the pack makes an obvious change in gameplay, and just by looking at the new stuff you can tell pretty much what it does. The second reason is that it’s relatively easy to bodge together 3d models for the heavy weapons – since I have to do everything myself, I’m all in favour of making things easy where I can!
Looking at the development work itself, the heavy weapons are in a pretty good place right now. The rules for their use are fairly solid, the 3d models are mostly fine, and they’ve been playtested a reasonable amount. There are still some tweaks to do, but overall I’m pleased with how they’re going.
The overall concept behind Close Encounters and its expansions is that it should be conceptually fairly simple, and that although you don’t need to buy all the expansions to have fun, all the parts of the game should work well together if you’re playing with more than one expansion. That has led to the last week or so being spent on reorganising and redrafting the equipment cards, so that they align with the ideas in another expansion pack. The equipment cards have NOT been playtested much, especially not in their new organisation, so I’m looking forward to trying them all out!
The new bug types also haven’t seen a lot of testing time. Although I’m fairly confident their stats and mechanics are good, I want to see them in action more before I put them in the ‘finished’ pile. There’s also some new map tiles and tokens which need testing. The good news is that a lot of the design work – the 3d models, tile art, etc – has already been done. That sort of thing can take a long time to get right and iterations are slower than for rules tweaks.
With all that in mind, then, I’d better get back to work!
Encounter Table Games 